Review of Soleus Air HGW-308 Micathermic Flat-Panel Heater

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List Price: $99.99
Sale Price: $59.99
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I bought this item, because it's design and description sounded like a good thing. I received it, set it up, and read the directions. THE VERY VAGUE, and poorly written directions. In the product sales description (one line), it said there is an adjustable thermostat. THERE IS NOT ONE AT ALL! There is an INTERNAL thermostat that sets itself whenever it decides to turn ITSELF on or off. There is NO temperature read out, there is no control for you, the operator to set and tell it to continue on until the room reaches this temp. One of the features that attracted me was that there are two wattage settings...1500W or 900W. I thought, this would be great, when the room gets warm enough, I can lower the wattage setting, and save on electricity costs. AGAIN, YOU CANNOT CONTROL THE WATTAGE SETTING. IT'S ALL INTERNAL...the MACHINE does it when it wants to! I will type the description right out of their manual... "Economic Energy Saving Function (ECO)-When the room temperature reaches a certain point, the ECO green light will switch on, indicating that one-third of the power has been cut-off automatically to save energy." Problem is...IT NEVER STAYS AT FULL WATTAGE...within 5 minutes of giving off heat at a full 1500 watts, it will switch to the lower wattage...NO MATTER WHAT TEMP THE ROOM IS. I have Econo-Heat Flat Panel Wall Heaters in my living room (check them out THEY ARE INCREDIBLE!), and when we have these cold, cold nights, my living room goes down to below 60 at night. I got this space heater to compensate in the mornings to quickly warm up the space. But, with this damn machine automatically deciding on it's own to switch to the lower wattage...it's impossible to warm anything up quickly..or at all for that matter!! NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO TO KEEP IT AT THE FULL WATTAGE....IT DOES NOT WORK!!! Plus, there is no real indicator mark on the dial itself. You never know, is this where the full on setting should be...or is it here? Plus the directions give no indication either...you just never know what to line any of the dials marking to. THEN, HERE'S THE BEST PART!! In their direction packet they have a big STOP sign sheet that says, "Don't take this item back to where you bought it, CALL US...here's our 1-800 number, we'll be glad to help and answer any questions." I called them for four days straight and all I ever got was an answering maching. Finally on the 5th day I left a message. I wanted someone to explain the internal workings of this machine so that I could have some control over the wattage settings. That same day I also sent them an email...to this day I have heard NOTHING...no phone call back, no email...NOTHING!!! How's that for customer support! WAIT.... THERE'S MORE... I figured, well as a last resource I can put this machine down in my basement to help keep it warm so my pipes don't freeze (cold upstate New York winters). Another "feature" of this machine is that there is what's called a "Snowflake" setting, especially for use in basements. You plug it in, put it on the setting (again not really knowing where to really line the little snowflake image up to) and The machine will automatically come on when the room reaches below 41 degrees. Well, I keep a thermometer in my basement...when I placed this heater in my basement the temp on the thermometer was 38 degrees. That means as soon as I plug the thing in, it should turn on, right? HA!!! Fat chance!!! I stood there for 20 minutes, playing with the dial, trying to see what it did, and it did nothing! I went downstairs about 3 times during the course of the night, and though my basement kept getting colder, the heater never came on. URRRGGGGGGHHHH...I HATE THIS MACHINE...DO NOT BUY THIS IF YOU WANT TO BE MASTER OF YOUR HEATING DOMAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I bought this heater last year and imediately thought I had made a mistake. But after using it a while, it has become my favorite room heater. I can use it anywhere and not be afraid of fire, it's the only electric heater I will leave on at night. As stated above the back does get hotter than the brochure indicates, but certainly not hot enough to start a fire, so I use it on the provided legs. At night I turn the thermastat down and use this heater in my bedroom, it has really saved me on energy cost. I love it's portability.

I believe many people are not use to the way this heater works, and are not giving it a chance. I came to Amazon today to buy another one, saw some of the low ratings given by buyers, and decided to let Amazon buyers know "THIS IS EXCELLENT PRODUCT".

One thing, It will stink until the new burns off, then it's a really good heater...........My two dogs and cat love it, they live in front of it on cold days.......I don't usually write reviews for Amazon, though I buy lots of things from them, this time I felt I had to defend my choice of heaters.

By the way I have two of those Wal-mart cheapies and they can't touch this one. I recomend this product.....

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I purchased 3 of these heaters, one for each bedroom. I was very unhappy with them and returned all for a refund. There were two problems. First, very little heating capacity. The $20 space heaters from Wal-Mart I bought produced much more heat. Secondly, I had purchased these heaters because of the wall-mount feature. I thought that would be cool to have them out of the way. The problem was that the back got extremely hot (couldn't even touch surface without discomfort). I called the company and they said that it was safe, not a fire hazard. However, upon calling two people (one handyman, one person in heating department at Lowe's), they did say it was a fire hazard, that the drywall and wood couldn't get that hot behind it. I was extremely uncomfortable mounting it to the wall because I was afraid I would burn the house down! It just did not appear to be as safe as the company was saying it was. So I returned all three and got a refund on all of them.

Sallie

Honest reviews on Soleus Air HGW-308 Micathermic Flat-Panel Heater

I bought this in the middle of Oct of 07 in prep for the winter. Before i turned on the furnace for the year i tried using this heater to heat my computer room since that is where most of our time is spent. We were previously using a small (about a 1 ft cube) hot air blowing space heater that sadly does a much better job heating the room than this panel heater. I can have this unit sitting 6 inches behind my chair while at my desk and I'll STILL be cold. I left it on for a week straight thinking it may just need some time to heat the "stuff" in the room. It didn't work that way.

I tried to see if there really was a need for the unit to be on. I didn't know if there was a certain temperature that this would work best at so i turned on the furnace and set it to 61 so it would only kick on when actually necessary. The thermostat is in the computer room and the panel unit was about 4 feet from the thermostat and my furnace still turned on.

I unplugged it and turned on the small space heater. The room warmed up and the furnace didn't turn back on after 2 1/2 hrs.

It's the first week of Nov '07 and it's going back. If it can't handle fall it surely won't man up in winter.

Don't buy this heater.

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As another reviewer said, this unit does not operate as advertised. Turn the unit on and within minutes, no matter what the temperature of the room is, the heater will go into it's ECO (Economic Energy Saving Function) mode. So it will never warm my small room quickly, for that matter, it never warms the room to a decent temperature at all. I was very disappointed with this heater and I would not recommend it to anyone.